A skillful, agonizing parable of wartime trauma and quiet persistence.
Violence, betrayal, and compromise mark the lives of a motley band of World War I recruits in Daigle’s debut novel.
Joseph Whelan, James Swift, and Cass Ballard have all suffered from unhappiness in their lives. Whelan, who was brought up in a Brooklyn orphanage, takes up organized crime with the notorious Gopher Gang; Swift, the son of a Chicago meatpacking magnate, struggles with the social stratification of his boarding school; and Ballard, who departs North Carolina to join the Army, is brutally assaulted during his journey to enlist. All three eventually find themselves drafted into the U.S. Army’s 165th Regiment, and they’re soon killing young soldiers who are similar to themselves. The labor of battle and the weight of the past have effects on the young men, and questions of mercy, punishment, obligation, and forgiveness arise as each does his best to stay alive. In the pressure of combat, Swift starts exhibiting psychopathic traits and confesses to slicing the hamstrings of a soldier who attempted desertion. Whelan, meanwhile, becomes anxious about a police officer who attempts to alert his military superiors to his crimes in Manhattan. Later, Swift’s actions give Whelan the opportunity to shed long-standing guilt and start over. Overall, this novel is intense but believable, and the drama is relentless. But despite the book’s action-heavy orientation, the prose is speckled with moments that possess a certain accuracy and psychological acuity, such as the counterintuitive idea that soldiers’ desires to live can lead them to their deaths and that Swift, who lacks an emotional “home,” runs no risk of this. The insights aren’t belabored, though; instead, they’re naturally borne out by the novel’s events. Its images are also astutely placed; at one point in the chaos of battle, for example, a dead, eviscerated mule is found lodged 30 feet up a tree.
A skillful, agonizing parable of wartime trauma and quiet persistence.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5191-3010-5
Page Count: 414
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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